


rarely pure and never simple

by road_rhythm



Series: S14 codas [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Aftermath of Possession, Angst, Dubious Consent, Emotional Kink, Episode Tag, Episode: s14e17 Game Night, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, bad idea bears - Freeform, implied/undernegotiated kink asymmetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-06 18:31:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18393977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/road_rhythm/pseuds/road_rhythm
Summary: The memory won't leave Dean alone: Sam's eyes going unfocused; the glimpse, through the slitted lids, of something unraveling in his brain. It really doesn't matter that the physical evidence has been removed.//Coda to 14x17.





	rarely pure and never simple

**Author's Note:**

> Follows immediately on events of 14x17, "Game Night." The little pocket of time I'm imagining this slots into will probably get jossed come Thursday.

There's this… thing. Dean thinks of it as theirs. Which kind of makes them sound like the mafia, but whatever. It's their thing. That's as much as can be said about it, really.

When they can't find Jack or their mother, they fall back to the Bunker. Because they need to regroup. Because they need clues. Because (Sam was dying less than twenty-four hours ago) Dean needs intel, and supplies, and space to figure out what to do with them.

 _Because you rely on it,_ says a voice that sounds a lot like his father's. _You know ought to know better._

Dean ignores it. Now is not the time.

But, then, their growing dependence on a home base is not the only question that keeps getting kicked down the road. It's not the only issue requiring that they sit down and hash out a plan of some kind, once and for all. It's not even the biggest one. Now is not the time to deal with any of those, either. Except that there is always one that declares its own time, and they have negotiated many extensions, now, have bought time to find a permanent solution of some sort, time and time again; and time and time again, they've let that time run through their fingers. Each time, they're caught unprepared.

His mind keeps replaying it: the wet grit soaking into his knees; Donatello hovering. There hadn't been that much blood. Not on the outside, anyway.

Dean shuts the medicine cabinet and goes out into the hall.

It's quiet in the bunker. He spent weeks, months wishing for just a little fucking peace around here, but now the silence obtrudes. Doesn't matter. They'll find Jack, they'll find Mom, and not having random strangers using the place as an interdimensional hostel will make it easier to focus and get the job done faster.

When Dean rounds the corner into the map room, Sam's there in the library, standing at the end of the nearest table. Something's in his hands.

It's the syringe, and Sam's staring at it intently. He hasn't moved, but Dean knows that he knows Dean's there. Dean lets his eyes flicker over him, frowning. Sam's face is unreadable, but there's an instinct that tells Dean something's going on, here. It's a lot like the instinct that told him there was something off about the way Nick looked at his brother from the jump, but that one, Dean never pursued. He let it go because there was too much else in his head, and look how that turned out.

Dean moves into the room, lifts his chin toward the stainless steel cylinder. "What is that thing?"

The barrel of the syringe turns under Sam's long fingers. "It's used to extract angelic grace. Extract and inject, apparently. Demons must have provided Nick with it."

"Yeah, Mom said." There it is again, that sense that there's something Dean's missing. Something he's not privy to.

Sam glances at him and sets the syringe down with the rest of the junk from Donatello's. "We may as well hang onto it. Never know. I'll hit the books, see if there's a way to sterilize it or whatever."

Dean stops beside Sam and reaches past him to take the syringe out of the box. He feels more than hears the indrawn breath where his arm brushes Sam's side. The syringe itself—well, Dean wondered, obviously, what Nick was doing with an old-timey metal number when modern disposables were a hell of a lot easier to come by. But it was just one of so many things that didn't tally, and all the others seemed more pressing. It hits him now that if Sam had been there, this whole carousel trip might have been averted, because Sam clearly recognizes the syringe.

"Wait a minute, _extract?_ What do they need this thing for to tap an angel? We've seen that happen; they use a blade."

He's giving Sam every opportunity to come clean, here.

"Probably didn't have an angel," says Sam. "They'd have had to use Nick."

It takes a minute for it to hit. When it does, Dean feels familiar nausea. At least, it became familiar after Michael, but for weeks now he's been able to keep the thought of what might—must—have been left behind out of his head.

One corner of Sam's mouth turns up, that rueful, pensive non-smile of his. "On the bright side, I guarantee it hurt." He plucks the syringe out of Dean's fingers, drops it in the box, and closes the wooden lid.

As Sam turns to go, Dean's hand shoots out and closes on his arm. Sam looks from Dean's hand to Dean's face, nothing more than a faint question on his own. Like he doesn't even give a shit that Dean's fingers are tight enough he can feel bone under muscle, like this upsets him in no wise, and that pisses Dean off and Dean doesn't even clearly know why. He releases Sam's arm and wipes his hand over his mouth.

"Want to explain how you know that?" Dean asks pointedly, like he's belaboring the obvious, which he is.

A flicker in Sam's eyes. It might have been anger. Whatever it was, it's gone in less than a breath. "After Gadreel," he says, and this just is really not Dean's week. "For that tracking spell we tried."

A muscle works in Dean's jaw as he stares at the box. "Would it work on me?"

There's nothing but compassion on Sam's face. It makes Dean's skin crawl just a little. "Maybe. But Cas said the traces that get left in the vessel are harmless."

"Yeah, well, considering the son of a bitch installed a psychic cat flap in my head, pardon me if I want to be sure."

Sam honestly looks like he's struggling with his decision for a minute. But he says, "No."

"Fine, I'll get Cas to do it."

"All right. Good luck with that. But I won't."

"Fine." 

This isn't what Dean came out here for. Not twenty-four hours ago, Sam was bleeding out; now they're doing _this_ again. Can't even call it fighting. They've done less and less of it lately, whatever it is, and since Michael have done the least of it in years, but it figures that Gadreel would be the thing that brought them back here. Suddenly Dean feels very tired.

Which Sam sees, of course. He lets his own fatigue show in answer, and Dean feels pandered to. "Get some rest," Sam says, like Dean's the one who needs it. He claps Dean on the arm and goes out.

The brief contact makes Dean shudder. Like a single tap on the skin of a drum.

* * *

A salient fact about their thing is that Dean can't ask for it. Is that a fact? Or a rule? Somewhere between a fact and a rule. He's not sure who made it a rule, to whatever extent it is one.

But that rule (if it's a rule) is predicated on Sam paying attention to when Dean needs it, and letting him have what he needs. As for the first part, the paying attention part—well, Sam has to know, after something like what happened yesterday. Yeah, Sam's plate is a little full right now; he's barely coping with his own shit, that's clear and it's fair, but there's no way he's been paying so little attention that he doesn't know Dean needs it. It just doesn't work that way. They don't work that way. Then again, the last time they _did_ work that way, it was because Lucifer was crowding Sam's head so badly that they had to share every room with him.

Dean understands a little better, now. Not fully, but he understands something of it: what it is to realize you've forfeited the right ever to be alone again.

The second part, though. The part where Sam delivers. The hours wear on and that still hasn't happened.

Dean makes it to almost midnight. He does fine as long as there's actual searching to do, but once he's horizontal on his own bed, looking up at the ceiling with only the faint noise of the climate control system to temper the silence, everything he crammed down in the two seconds after Sam sat up gasping and before Dean turned back around to face him rises back up like bile.

Sam opens up maybe five seconds after Dean's knock in sleep pants and a v-neck. He doesn't look surprised to see Dean there, but he doesn't say anything, either. Dean clears his throat. "Mind if I come in?"

Sam steps aside.

Dean looks around. He's been in here countless times, but it always feels a little weird. Stranger in a strange land. Maybe it's just because he has no childhood baseline—their longest tenancy was three months, and it was in a trailer—but every time he crosses the threshold, he has a moment's doubt whether he knows Sam at all. Of course, much of the strangeness stems from the fact even now the room doesn't feel lived in. When Dean got back from Michael joyriding him, it was noticeably more cluttered, but only with the clutter of work. It remained cluttered as long as the bunker teemed with refugees and Sam remained their coordinator. Then some died while they were caging up Michael; a little of the clutter subsided. The rest of them died after Michael escaped anyway; now the room is as spartan as it's ever been.

"Are you _ever_ gonna move in," Dean says, because it's an old, familiar script, and the rule is Dean cannot ask.

Sam knows his line. "Not all of us are into moldy pizza chic."

"I prefer the term 'vintage.'"

Dean gives the room an unobtrusive 360. This place is more than spartan, actually. Papers are squared in their stacks, pens are aligned precisely beside a notebook centered on the desk, books all have exactly the same margin between spine and front edge of shelf, and the bed could bounce a quarter and smells of bleach. Like, from the middle of the room, Dean can smell it. Oh, well. Each to his own pathological coping mechanism.

"Would've thought you'd have changed rooms, after—" Dean realizes what he's saying as he's saying it and breaks off.

He's said too much already, though. "After Lucifer was in here?" Sam looks right at Dean. "Not much point, is there?"

The knowing in the words carves cold into Dean's viscera. He can't look at that, so he looks at Sam.

It really doesn't matter that the physical evidence has been removed; it's been less than a _day_ and the memory won't leave Dean alone. Sam's eyes going unfocused; the glimpse, through the slitted lids, of something unmaking in his brain. The blanch of circulatory shock that made it look like Sam's cheek and Dean's hand on it existed in two different realities. Pulling his own face into a smile. Sam abandoning the counting game to try to tell Dean something meaningful, trying to comfort _him,_ and yeah, now Dean knows why his own deathbed talk pissed Sam off so much.

Blotting blood from his brother's temple. One hand on Sam's lapel, one hand on Sam's head.

No hand on Sam's pulse.

Dean couldn't actually tell, is the thing. He didn't know for certain—took care not to know—until after Jack did his thing and Sam gasped, surging upright under the force of something vital being pressed back in. _Then_ Dean knew. He's heard that first breath too many fucking times not to, and when the knowledge hit him it physically spun him away.

Knowing it all over again now is actually worse. There wasn't space to feel it at the time. Now there is.

Sam might not be bleeding anymore, but he still looks like crap. Dean catalogues the red rimming his eyes, the translucency of the skin under them, the defeat in his posture. Sam watches him back, and he knows why Dean's here, he _knows_. It rarely comes to pass, their thing, but it is always there.

The words stick in Dean's throat: _Can I, can I._

Instead he gestures with his chin, curt, and says, "I need to look at your head."

Something in Sam's eyes shutters down. "Jack healed me."

Jack did a lot more than that. "What, and I'm supposed to just trust he didn't miss anything? Kid's been alive less time than they make doctors go to med school. You know the drill, come on."

Dean could take Sam to the infirmary. Sam walks like he thinks Dean's taking him to the infirmary, even though they both know that he's not. But when Dean propels him through his own door with a hand on the small of his back, he goes without comment.

The med kit's open on the bed. Of course Dean knows it's unnecessary, he does trust Jack, but. Sam sits on the edge of the bed, hands flexing on his knees, and Dean gets that floor-dropped-out-from-under-him swoop in his stomach. His heart pounds as he steps up close. Sam's fingers pluck at a stray thread on his right knee. When nothing's happened after a minute, Sam raises his eyes.

Dean reaches out slowly and takes Sam's face in his hands. He cradles his cheek in one palm as he combs Sam's hair back from his temple with his fingers. Sam's eyes are huge, pupils darting from Dean's face to the door.

With his fingers, Dean inspects Sam's skull methodically, as if there really could be something there. Sam swallows and shuts his eyes, and Dean keeps his fingertips careful, careful in the place where hair meets scalp, sees the little shiver when they push at the roots. Sam showered earlier, and the hair is soft, clean, curling slightly, Dean's so glad it's curling, glad of the way it wraps around his fingers just a little bit, and he smooths both thumbs over Sam's cheekbones.

Sam shudders.

Michael was repulsed by Dean's wanting. Not by any of the things Dean wants—not by any amount of his sadism, or gluttony, or lust. None of that phased him. Dean could slaughter armies, eat sixteen cheeseburgers a day, and fuck his brother against the pearly gates, if he liked; Michael didn't give a shit. What he hated was the _manner_ of Dean's wanting. The tangled-up stickiness of it, the contradictions: those he found disgusting. Just before he submerged Dean, he told him: _I know how to simplify your want. I'm going to make it pure_.

Then Dean was drowning, and the need for air was the only thing that existed.

Unlike Sam, Dean doesn't bleach his sheets. That means he can smell the shampoo lifting off of Sam's hair as he combs his fingers through it; when he brings his nose close to Sam's throat—soon—he'll be able to smell shower-clean skin. Sam's slenderer than he was through his late twenties, but his neck's still strong, a smooth column of muscle and sinew meeting sternum. The v-neck hides his clavicles, but the fabric is soft enough it drapes into the hollows there. Dean presses four fingers into the vertebrae at the back of Sam's neck, thumb over his carotid, thump, thump. His other hand tucks the hair he messed up behind Sam's ear. Dean's mouth's a little dry. He takes a minute to get his breathing under control, then says, "C'mon, up," and coaxes Sam to lift his arms so Dean can pull the tee up and over them.

There are some small traces of the fight on Sam's torso, just the ones so minor Jack probably didn't notice them. Which, apart from the massive skull fracture, are all the injuries Sam sustained. Dean wants to ask what the fuck happened. He wants to say, _Tell me how Nick came out of that fight alive, and don't bullshit me, because I've seen you take down angels and demons with your hands literally tied._

_Tell me you didn't let him._

Instead he asks, "He get you anywhere else?"

Looking away, Sam slowly shakes his head. Of course, Dean's going to check, anyway.

He steps back for the survey. There's Sam's surgical scar, twisting over his shoulder and down to his elbow. Sam lost a lot of weight back then, and he's never managed to put all of it back on. He's still strong, of course. He has reserves of physical strength that he hardly ever allows himself to use anymore, and Dean tells himself he doesn't understand why but he does, because the way Sam started holding back with his body lines up too exactly with when he stopped using his powers for Dean not to. Dean's been dreading the day that gets his brother killed. Now that day has come and gone, and it was exactly as bad as Dean thought.

There's a muscle working in the corner of Sam's jaw, and he's looking everywhere but at Dean. The longer Dean stands there looking, the faster Sam's chest rises and falls. Sam sits perfectly still, but it clearly costs him.

Dean told Sam he's satisfied with who they've become. It's true, most days, but he can't help wishing that with this, Sam could be just a little more like he was when he was younger. There was a time when Sam seemed almost unconscious of it: when Dean could check him over and Sam would no more think to impede him than a child would its mother. When Dean could skim his fingers along Sam's limbs and Sam's body wouldn't close off. When Dean could look, and look, and look. There'd been peace in that.

Now Sam is always self-conscious, and it only serves to sharpen Dean's want. Dean still doesn't know what he wants from this, any more than he did all the way back when it first started, but that's okay, because now he knows that it's the manner of wanting that's the thing.

"Gimme your arm."

Sam does. Dean's standing to his left, so Sam gives him the left, and Dean reaches out to touch the surgical scar. His stomach clenches at the contact, but who knows how many angelic healings since it happened have smoothed the pucker of skin along the edge. Dean can barely feel it under his fingertips.

He traces the scar down to the crook of Sam's elbow and leaves the pads of his fingers there. Here the skin is delicate, too thin to hide the structure of veins or the warmth of the blood in them. Dean thought he was going to hold out longer than this, but he breaks when he catches the brachial pulse under his fingers, and with a short noise he goes to his knees and buries his face in it.

"Dean." Sam's opposite hand comes up and pets at the back of Dean's head, a little frantically. "Dean, it's—"

But Sam knows better than to finish that sentence. _It's fine, you're fine, I'm fine._ Those words have been empty coming from either of them for a long time, and Sam knows that Dean needs to know that the information he gets in this room, at least, is real.

Dean breathes in deeply through his nose. His other arm wraps around Sam's waist. He probably looks like a freak. He does not give a single fuck.

Six, seven breaths and Dean rips his face out of his brother's elbow. "Gimme your other arm." Sam lets him take it, stretch it out beside the other, and rotate both to show the blue lines running down their undersides. They show clear through the milky skin. Granted, it's the middle of winter, but Sam always used to be tan. Now Sam's always pale. Dean isn't complaining about the aesthetics, can maybe even admit that something living deep down in his belly likes Sam's new look, but the problem is _what it means,_ and _what it means_ is Sam dying in the snow and telling Dean he's done a good job with the life Sam's forfeiting and Dean holds both of Sam's hands together, palm up, and buries his face in Sam's wrists.

He mouths over the veins, sinews, and soft skin here just to have the texture on his lips. Sam's saying something, but Dean can't hear it over the static in his head.

When Michael had him the first time, the surface of the water was always inches above his face. _I will simplify your want. I will make it pure._

It worked, the drowning. Not all the way, perhaps because Michael didn't keep it up long enough, but it _started_ to change him, and Dean isn't sure where that leaves him.

Lucifer had Sam a lot longer. There are so many questions Dean is afraid to ask, now.

Dean lifts his head to look up. This is the angle he likes. What he doesn't like is the look on Sam's face. Sam looks fearful, angry, and vulnerable. He looks like he's an inch away from vomiting, and a hair's breadth from breaking and letting Dean do what they both want. Because Sam does want Dean to take care of him. He just thinks that he shouldn't.

Tangled, contradictory. Complicated. Dean can make it simple.

Sam's breaths are punching his belly in, now, like someone's got a hook back behind his navel that they're jerking up, up, up. He's right on the edge of hyperventilation. Dean's going to fix it. He holds Sam's waist in both hands the way he held Sam's face, with his thumbs smoothing over the skin to either side, fingers firm at the back. "Let me," he says, low.

"Dean—"

Dean drops his face into Sam's lap and breathes in, long and deep. Sam's fingers are fisted in the bedspread to either side. Dean slips his fingers under the waistband of Sam's sleep pants and begins to pull. "Let me see."

High on Sam's left flank, he finds a bruise. He growls as he pushes his nose into it. On Sam's knee, he finds blood, a little patch of skin gone that Jack didn't bother with, and he opens his mouth over it and presses hard with his tongue. The little hurt interrupts Sam's spiral toward hyperventilation; Dean hears this and presses the advantage by discarding the pants and pinching a spot on the inside of Sam's thigh purple with his teeth.

Sam's not hard. Dean isn't, either, yet. He's not even sure the sex is necessary to their thing; if anything, it's more a scaffold they resort to because it may actually make this less weird. But right now he needs to calm Sam down, clarify him.

He places Sam's dominant hand on his own back where Sam will be able to feel the movement of Dean's respiration and looks up at him. "Breathe with me," he says. "Got it?"

Sam's brow creases, _Huh?_ He hasn't even noticed he's hyperventilating.

"Breathe with me," Dean says again, and then he bends down and takes Sam in his mouth.

He doesn't do much more than that, at first. Soft, Sam's dick is actually quite compact; they're growers in this family, not showers. Dean just holds it in his mouth, appreciates how it fits, and breathes. Long, deliberate breaths. His nose is pressed right up into the thatch of Sam's hair, and as the clean skin-smell fills him, something in Dean's own chest loosens and his breaths get longer and deeper. He cradles Sam's cock with his tongue, not to stimulate it, particularly, just feeling it there, and rubs his hands slowly up and down his little brother's back.

Sam moves the hand on Dean's back, fingers curling and seeking into Dean's shirt. Dean reaches back to snag Sam's wrist and, after some groping, plants Sam's palm where he wants it: flat between Dean's shoulders. He tells Sam to stay with a warning squeeze around the wrist. Then he flattens his own palm against Sam's belly and continues.

Breathe in. Hold for count of three. Sam's abdominals go still under his palm; Dean swirls his tongue, _Good, that's good,_ breathes out. Sam's rib cage lowers haltingly.

Dean lets yesterday play through his mind again. How clammy Sam's skin had been, how hot the point of impact was by contrast. How the gray sky just made the blood and the hazel of his eyes brighter. Kneeling, like now. Sam's face going slack and no awareness or control returning when Dean patted it, wanting to shake him hard but not daring to. Sam going still and Dean _not knowing,_ putting his hands anywhere but on Sam's pulse because he wasn't _going_ to know. He fucking couldn't. Dean makes a wounded noise around the cock in his mouth. Breathe in. Breathe out.

By the time he's coaxed Sam to hardness, those horrible, yanking breaths have evened out, Sam's come back from wherever he went, and the vise around Dean's heart has let go. As with any body part, it hurts worse after the clamp comes off. Dean pushes up, takes Sam's face in both his hands, and kisses him.

Sam helps him push the med kit out of the way. His hands fist in Dean's t-shirt, and that's fine, that's as it should be, Sammy can hold onto him any time, but Dean doesn't let him when Sam goes to tug it off. Dean's moving on instinct and trying not to think much, because like every other time they've done this, he couldn't tell anyone what it is that he wants here. He just knows that it's something out of reach. What Dean wants, he can't get a hold of even as he makes a pretty good bid to compass Sam's body completely with his own. It's something under the skin. Everything else is just a proxy.

Sam cradles Dean's face with his hands cupped under Dean's jaw, pressing his mouth to Dean's forehead and eyebrow and cheekbone, doing that thing he always does in sex where he tries to talk with his body because he won't let Dean hear his voice. Maybe he's digging for something he can't ever reach, too.

Dean pulls up with his hands under Sam's ass and tips him flat. The position is too much like Sam lying on the pavement, but this affords the best view. Dean holds himself up on one elbow along Sam's side, so he can see all of him, and works his hand over the full length of Sam's dick.

Yes; the sex is incidental. Dean's own cock is rock hard in his boxers but he could give two shits about getting off. Sam's beautiful like this, though, and that's important. It feeds an ache all through Dean that's simple and pure.

Sam locks eyes with Dean and his lips part like he's going to say something, and Dean kisses him hard to shut him up.

Sam can't talk with Dean's tongue in his throat, but he can make noises. Bitten-off sound when Dean flicks his wrist, panting when Dean rubs over his perineum, sharp breath through his nose when Dean thumbs precome out of his slit. Once Sam even gives him a whimper, like he knows it's Dean's favorite. Maybe he does.

Dean hoards it all to him until it blanks out everything else.

It's not that Dean's spared no thought at all for what this may have cost Jack. He loves the kid; that kid loves _Sam,_ he's proved that, and that is and always has been Dean's price. But whatever the sacrifice may have been, Dean doesn't have it in him to be anything other than grateful.

When he's pretty sure his brother's long since forgotten whatever he was going to say and he can feel that Sam is close, Dean pulls back so he can see. Sam follows him with his gaze, searching Dean's face, but then he shuts his eyes and Dean sees him give himself over.

Sam's dick pulses under Dean's fingers. His face breaks open, and it's silent but every line of his body bows up toward Dean.

Dean watches wide-eyed. "Perfect," he whispers.

The effect on Sam is immediate.

Before he even registers the change, Dean's on the floor. When he does register it, it's via the crack of tile on his ass. The experience is so jarring that it doesn't even occur to him to curse. He goes from rapture to cold stone under his boxers, and his mind fills in the jackknife of his brother's body that landed him here without comprehending the mechanics of it, much less the meaning.

Sam's on the bed with his arms flung up in front of him. His face is totally white.

"Sam?" Dean says, stupidly.

Sam is looking right at him, but Dean can tell he's not seeing him. He's got one knee up in front of his torso, with the other leg already swung down over the edge of the bed behind him, ready to bolt.

Dean plants one hand behind himself and holds the other out in front of him. "Sammy, it's just me. All right? Sam. Sammy."

Looks like all Dean's hard work on their breathing was for naught. Sam's an inch away from hyperventilating again.

Slowly, Dean pushes to his feet. Sam blinks, shakes his head once, hard, but otherwise doesn't budge. Dean's not totally stupid. He doesn't get what exactly set Sam off, but he knows it's about Lucifer. Or Nick. Same fucking difference.

"Sam." Dean makes his voice hard, so it cracks off the walls, and Sam's eyes clear a little bit. He's coming back, seeing the room. His arms lower an inch. He looks at Dean, and humiliation begins to unfold in his eyes.

Dean frowns, takes a calculated step toward his brother. He needs to test this. "Sammy? 'Perfect'?"

Sam lurches for the wastebasket, and Dean shuts his eyes.

He should have known. Now Sam's connected the dots for him, he kind of wants to use the wastebasket, too.

Dean goes down the hall to get water and a couple of towels and to give Sam a minute to collect himself. When he returns, Sam is dressed, sitting on the floor next to the bin with his back against the bed. He looks chagrined, but fully present.

"Here."

Sam looks up just long enough to take the glass Dean holds out, then his eyes swing down to the floor. He says nothing as Dean sits down facing him.

His position is blocking Sam's exit. He is alive to all the ways that's apt to have a bad effect on Sam right now, and sure enough, there's Sam's ring finger tap-tapping against the side of his knee, but he can feel the self-loathing pouring off of Sam in waves. Give him a clear shot and Sam will be out the door with a flimsy excuse, and it's on Dean to at least try to fix this. After all, Dean's the one who brought him here. He's still got no idea which of them made it a rule that Dean can't ask, but maybe this is why.

Just looking at Sam is a wound, and he doesn't know how to make it close so that his mind will stop screaming and let him have some peace.

"Sorry," Sam offers after a while. His voice is dull. For a nickel he would put his fist in the wall.

Dean feels stretched thin. No doubt this applies equally in the other direction, but Sam's self-hatred can be exhausting to deal with. "You okay?" Dean asks. 

Sam looks at the ceiling to blink the brightness in his eyes back and scoffs. Yeah, okay, fair. 

Dean takes a stab. "Look, man, I know I gave you a hard time about Nick, but—none of his shit is your fault. None of it. You couldn't have known."

"Mom said the same thing," Sam answers eventually. "And that giving him a chance was the decent thing to do."

"Yeah, well. She's right."

Sam's laugh is quiet, and it makes the skin on the back of Dean's neck prickle. "You don't even believe that. But she wasn't wrong for the reasons that you think."

Though he's not sure why, Dean thinks of the way Sam stared at that syringe.

"If you'd let me talk to him, Dean, if you'd just—" Sam's jaw works as he stares at the wall over Dean's shoulder. "But, um." Sam swallows, nods to himself. "You were right. I was out of control."

He really wasn't. The body check Sam gave Nick was practically a love tap, compared to both what Dean gave him an hour later and what Sam is actually capable of. Sam was angry, raw, _devastated,_ but not out of control. What Sam's agreeing to, the history he's now signing off on in his head, isn't true. Dean feels a little sick.

But what can he say? If he tells Sam the truth— _the way he looked at you made my skin crawl; I was trying to protect you_ —that won't go over very well.

Sam drags a hand down his face and his shoulders slump. "Anyway." He pushes to his feet and stoops to collect the glass. "Thanks." He heads for the door.

"Sammy." Dean reaches out and gently catches his arm.

He can feel Sam wavering between the urge to get out and disappear and the comfort Dean's offering. Dean tugs, but keeps his hold loose, biting his lip. After a second Sam yields, turning back toward the bed with what Dean would like to think is relief.

"C'mon, let's get some sleep."

They stretch out facing each other rather than tangling up in each other; it lets Sam find a comfortable position for his long limbs and is likelier to result in restful sleep. Dean slips one arm over Sam's waist and rests his chin on the top of Sam's head. Sam sighs, and the air stirs against Dean's sternum.

Dean shuts his eyes.

Sam's drained enough that he's out in a matter of minutes. Dean lies there in the dark feeling his side rise and fall under his arm, and this time it's Dean's turn to match his breathing to Sam's. In. Out. In. Out.

One, two, three, four.

He lets sleep pull him under as he counts his brother's breaths.


End file.
